Posts

In the off chance you know me, have stumbled across my blog, and we haven't spoken lately, I've moved. I am now a lecturer in Political science at the United States Studies Centre, at the University of Sydney. My details are here (also FYI - they jumped the gun on the Dr, officially it's almost Dr*). …

I'm just finishing up at the 2016 Australian Political Studies Association annual conference in Sydney, and thought I'd post the slides of the papers I presented with colleagues Andrea Carson, Marija Taflaga and Yannick Dufresne. The first paper looked at the demographic and environmental predictors of concern about immigration in Australia. Immigration policy has been a divisive political issue …

The case of same-sex marriage Last week I presented a paper at the US Political Science Association annual meeting in Philadelphia with some colleagues. In it, we look at the congruence between public opinion and the positions of parliamentarians on same-sex marriage. Our findings indicate that parliamentarians are generally representative of their constituents, giving some …

Since the Australian federal election, held last Saturday, I've had a few thoughts. These are only half-formed, so bear with me. First, Coalition leader (and current prime minister) Malcolm Turnbull is getting a lot of heat for the relatively poor performance of the Liberal Party (and its various state-based permutations). Some of this is reasonable. The double …

Over the weekend I was asked by the Election Watch team at the University of Melbourne to comment on the polling conducted for the Brexit referendum. The article that came out of this can be found somewhere on their blog, I'm sure. Here are the comments I provided in full (questions are bolded): 1. What do the …

Even a casual observer of Australian politics will likely know that the Coalition tends to do better in some areas, and Labor in others. However, some important patterns are missed, either because geographic variation is often examined at the electorate level (sometimes obscuring important variation within divisions, which can be relatively large sptial areas) or because the mapping …

I haven't posted in a while. Mostly that has been because I have been working on my thesis. Of course. There were also a few days off over Christmas,* some teaching (Applied Research Methods and Political Psychology at the University of Melbourne) and a few other things. Also, some other research. I presented a few papers …

On Tuesday Paul Keating once again popped his head above the trenches to take a shot at another political player from the 1980s. The crime was the usual one: they had dared try and hog some of the limelight from “his” reforms. In the past, Keating’s energies on this front have been largely directed at …

(Some of the graphs in this piece came out a little odd - mostly too larger. apologies, I can't quite get them to look right). Last week, Ben Reilly wrote a compelling piece on party convergence in Australia, arguing many of the problems identified with contemporary politics in this country could be explained by describing …

Today we lost Malcolm Fraser, Australia's fourth longest serving prime minister (1975-83) and a man truly dedicated to public service. He may have also (briefly) changed the divisions of Australian politics in ways consistent with his later socially progressive activities. Much has been written about his time in office, as well as his contribution to public life since he …